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Abstract

In this paper, a novel meshless method for the transient modeling of subsurface flow in unsaturated soils was developed. A linearization process for the nonlinear Richards equation using the Gardner exponential model to analyze the transient flow in the unsaturated zone was adopted. For the transient modeling, we proposed a pioneering work using the collocation Trefftz method and utilized the coordinate system in Minkowski spacetime instead of that in the original Euclidean space. The initial value problem for transient modeling of subsurface flow in unsaturated soils can then be transformed into the inverse boundary value problem. A numerical solution obtained in the spacetime coordinate system was approximated by superpositioning Trefftz basis functions satisfying the governing equation for boundary collocation points on partial problem domain boundary in the spacetime coordinate system. As a result, the transient problems can be solved without using the traditional time-marching scheme. The validity of the proposed method is established for several test problems. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method is highly accurate and computationally efficient. The results also reveal that it has great numerical stability for the transient modeling of subsurface flow in unsaturated soils.
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